This is the video we mention in the strip. I'm tempted to put the word "interview" in quotes; Xbox President Sarah Bond was essentially thrown to the wolves doing something like this after the closures. None of us have any use for these performances, and as far as I'm concerned we shouldn't require them.
Frankly, Bloomberg's Dina Bass was unrelenting in her initial questions - but this entire mode of address doesn't allow for depth. You can't follow up. It may be, as occurs often, that the questions had to be sent ahead of time. There are many guardrails around an event like this that make it difficult to derive sense from the people who rule the world. Is the fact that they gave no answer, meaningfully, the answer? We're talking about it right now, for example. Is that the utility of this sacred business ritual? If we are being polite, it is. I identify as a crank, as opposed to a jerk. But I don't think it's sufficient, because nothing ever happens. It's abstracted from consequence by the scale of the participants and by a fundamental gulf between the needs of these kaiju and more colloquial needs - by which I mean "the needs that you and I have."
I was already complaining about this on the Tweeter. There's an empty, corporate, therapized cadence to these rituals, and the ability to perform this kind of speech may be an important signal that you're ready to say absolutely nothing at the highest echelons of power. Understand that the man in the video below was asked where OpenAI trained its Sora video product, and the answer is obviously YouTube. We know this for a couple reasons. One, there isn't anywhere else to get enough video for free and have it be varied enough to train their model. Two, and this is one is pretty clear, if it hadn't been trained on YouTube he would just say so. Listen to this horseshit, from what I presume is the same event as above, where this wind-up man just vibrates and various squonks come out.
OpenAI still can't answer a simple yes or no question of whether YouTube videos were used to train Sora.
— Reid Southen (@Rahll) May 10, 2024
What you get instead is a total dodge and, "We're looking at this problem, it's really hard."
They're going to run out of executives to embarrass at this rate. pic.twitter.com/vOZYoU5iK7
What I said at the time was that if a person talks like this, we should be able to let hungry dogs eat them. I'm prepared to accept that this might be rude. Interviewer Shirin Ghaffari bites him at the end - rhetorically, not literally - but in an environment governed by true cause and effect, where you can ask a person an important question about all the shit they stole and just have them speak in tongues, she should be able to bite him. Like, not hard. Well, maybe kinda hard. He shouldn't have to go to the doctor or anything but he should definitely remember it happened.
(CW)TB out.
